Global Crossing’s Ethernet Portfolio Expands

Published on 08/10/2009

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Global Crossing has announced it has added the Global Crossing EtherSphere family of services to the company’s Ethernet WAN transport offers. The new globally available services are EtherSphere Multipoint-to-Multipoint, EtherSphere Point-to-Multipoint and EtherSphere Point-to-Point solutions. They are available today as enterprise and wholesale offers in North America, Europe, the United Kingdom (UK), Asia, and Latin America.

“Clearly, Ethernet is rapidly becoming the primary communications technology for global IT organizations,” added Carey. “Ethernet is a proven LAN technology for businesses today. And with next-generation enterprise applications, such as disaster recovery, storage, and packet voice and video, driving steep increases in bandwidth demand, enterprise IT managers know that data services over legacy technologies simply do not get the job done. Traditional data services are expensive to scale, operationally complex, and can be painfully slow to upgrade.”

“With the launch of EtherSphere, Global Crossing has placed itself in a competitive position for meeting growing demand in the market for international any-to-any Layer 2 Carrier Ethernet services,” stated Joel Stradling, senior analyst at Current Analysis. “The operator is hitting the market with a well-designed Ethernet VPLS offer that is enhanced with several features, such as support for up to six CoS, and flexible pricing and bandwidths. The richness in capability combined with strong existing global MPLS reach and know-how make the Global Crossing EtherSphere product range a strong proposition in the market.”

According to Ian Redpath, Principal Analyst, Ovum, the global Ethernet VPLS market is projected to increase from $1.3 billion in 2008 to $8.4 billion in 2014, which translates into an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate of 37 percent.

VPLS is an ideal technology for enterprises that need to connect data centers or remote locations. It is particularly attractive to the healthcare, financial, government, and technology industries interested in deploying multi-site, multi-regional WANs. It is a private Ethernet (Layer 2) network constructed over a “packet-based” infrastructure that has the ability to span several networks. Global Crossing’s VPLS supports a range of connectivity options, including multipoint-to-multipoint, point-to-multipoint, and point-to-point.

Global Crossing’s EtherSphere services support six classes of service that enable users to prioritize traffic to maximize bandwidth use and efficiency. The service also offers a highly desirable usage-based billing component that helps enterprises more easily accommodate irregular and unpredictable bandwidth use, as well as more effectively manage their network costs. This is especially beneficial for backup and disaster recovery implementations.